Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

HAVE SALAMI, WILL TRAVEL

Dense bricks of food are always the most satisfying to eat. Examples: blocks of cheese, fudge, avocado, pâté, cured salmon, sausage. Uniformity of texture is crucial, as is resistance (it should feel like trying to run through quicksand when you eat.) Richness too. Definitely richness.

Technically, most of these things make great on-the-go snacks. There's nothing easier to munch on than a slab of something, like cheese or fudge: no crumbs, no napkins. Socially speaking, however, dense snacks are a thorny affair. Everybody loves metabolising salami, but only the confident few will comfortably walk down the street or through the office corridor with meat stick in hand.

But what if you must have that dense snack? Herewith, some tips:

1. Hide your embarrassing snack in a paper bag, and take regular pulls as you would a can of beer on a hot summer day. Easy. Colleagues will simply assume that you're sipping a cold Miller. Reputation saved!

2. Pick a snack free from embarrassing associations. Brownies are a good choice. Modest sausages or small amounts of cheese are fine. Lärabars are particularly handy--made of dried fruit and nuts, they are condensed into small bars with an agreeable heft (though surely some of that extra weight comes from the irrelevant umlauts).

These tricks ought to get you through the work day. But once restored to the comfort of your own home, do feel free to cut yourself a wedge of cheesecake and reconnect the peanut butter IV drip. Bon appetit!

~ MOLLY YOUNG

Picture credit: chad davis (via Flickr)